TALES OF TERROR AND TRIUMPH
Four Years .Beneath the Crescent. By Raphael de Nogales. (Scribilers. 12s. Bd.) - • An Escaper's Log. By D. Grinnell-Milne. (John Lane. 7s. ad.)
Tlik:SE two books are both about escaping. Captain Grinnell- ikfilne's is wholly_ delightful and typically English in its reserve. M. de _Nogales' is very Latin, temperamental; vivid, enter- taining, but not entirely to be trusted -as history.
It -was a somewhat strange experience for Me- to pick up Four Years beneath the Crescent and, after a search in the dusty attic of my Turkish memories to try to discover where I had met the original of the frontispiece, to find my friends and myself looming picturesquely into the book as prisoners-of-war, en route between Mosul and' Aleppo. Then in a flash M. de Nogales stood out slim-131Y as the good friend who, at the peril of his own life, had helped-7-as had also a travelling Afghan of noble family—a little band of Englishmen in great distress._ M. de Nogales is a gentleman adventurcr from Venezuela, small of stature but great of heart. .- Re entered the service or the Turks in the War, only after having been iefuSed admission into the Allied Armies. At the time we met him he was returning from service in -.Iraq : , previously he had taken part in the-siege and capture of Van and the massacre
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of Armenians there, doing his -best as a Christian soldier to moderate the fury. of the Kurds_ and Circassians who had received orders - to exterminate every Armenian male over 12 years of age. M. de Nogales spares us no horror of these massacres, jackals eating babies, women going mad, grey-beards butchered in the streets, and children taken to worse than death, but he is careful to exempt the regular Ottoman Army from such crimes, and in this I agree with him, not without some knowledge of the intimate life of the Turk.
His book is valuable because, although it is inexact in many particulars, he did have opportunities to gauge the good and the had that go to make up the Turkish soldier, whom he calls "the first gentleman and the first soldier of the Orient." There are some exceptions to this eulogy, however. What the author_ says of the treatment of Marshal von der Golfs hi Khalil Pasha is very- interesting and -appears to lend colour to the (let us hope) quite unfounded gossip of the day, that the veteran Field-Marshal' Was poisoned, M. de Nogales asserts that Khalil Pasha also tried to poison him (de Nogales), but we take leave to doubt this. Still, the stakes were high and the author was, no doubt, a troublesome assistant, with his knowledge of the massacres. This is a sincere, uncommon, inaccurate, exciting story by ,a man who is a born soldier, writer, adventurer—and gentleman.
Escaping is always an interesting subject, for life is to a certain extent a series of escapes, from poverty, boredom, convention or the like, and it is the potential escaper in every man and woman of us that thrills to those more sharply focussed and dramatic escapes which took place from prison camps in wartime. There is a whole literature of escape books, of which The Road to Endor is perhaps the most famous, bu to my mind An Escaper's Log is the best escape book yet written because it is the vividest and one of the most simply told. Others may have tried oftener, or had brighter schemes, or written more penetratingly of the psyche of the prisoner : none have made their story live with so much actuality and so little artifice.
The escape from Friedberg was really extremely comic. Captains Grinnell-Milne and Fairweather disguised themselves as German officers, while the former's brother dressed himself as a civilian. The three of them constituted themselves an official German drainage commission. They dressed in their skilfully improvised uniforms in their rooms, covered them- selves with overcoats, walked to the office of the prison Commandant, which was empty at the time, pulled off their outer coverings and then calmly walked out of prison in the full glory of gold-foil epaulettes and scabbards made from biscuit tins, saluted by all the German sentries at the gates.
They were recaptured that time, alas ! and many other times. From Zorndorf, Captain Milne took an active directing part in a whole escape factory. Some of the prisoners made compasses, others forged passports, others made disguises ; meanwhile a score of them were tunnelling their way out. A few days before escape was to be made, however, a new Commandant arrived at the prison and discovered the tunnel, thus bringing to naught the work of months. But no one was downhearted ; they merely tried another plan.
In April 1918 Captain Milne was offered an exchange into Holland, but he was one of that small but patriotic band of prisoners who refused under any conditions whatsoever to give their parole and so renounce the hope of escape.
Liberty means different things to different people. To Captain Milne and those like him there was more liberty behind the barbed wire of a prison, with hope as an ineonquerable com- panion, than in the sluggish ease of a Dutch internment camp. He refused to go to Holland, but was sent with other prisoners to Aachen, and from there he at last succeeded in winning that freedom for which he had worked so hard and risked so much. This is a fine story, every word of which rings true.
F. Y.-B.
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